Bolton's A PIRATE LIFE, A BOARD GAME for the impossibly bored, is a tangy, buoyant ahoy. It is a game which invites the reader to roll the dice, take a card from the deck--short, shuffle-able blocks of prose are an avant-garde tradition--gain points, lose a turn, and, one way or another, advance around a notional board: a pirate's world of exotic ports, risky encounters, escapades, wonders and the routine of shipboard life. Cultural references bounce around, with jokes aplenty for the cognoscenti.
Fiction. Hybrid. Art.